Oublier
by Ancolie
Summary: "What is love if not obsession? If not carefully constructed madness?" Two cousins cling in desperation to each other as their world falls apart. A series of dark snapshots in the life of Regulus Black. Regulus/Narcissa
1. Madness

**Please review, darlings. This came to me in a moment of slight madness, and I'm interested to see what you all think.**

**I don't own. Obviously. If I did, someone wouldn't have ended up dead in a cave- he would have been recognized as the hero he was.**

* * *

An endless series of questions, of numbers that didn't add up to two or four, but instead to infinity. How can I love her? How can I not? The answer was in her eyes, her pale, flighty hands, the smooth secret patch of skin behind her ears that she loved him to caress, the flyaways in her thin white-blonde hair, the way she bit her lip and crossed her legs, the way she smiled- shyly, insincerely, vulnerability seeping out of the edges. It was simple arithmetic, dazzlingly mundane if he thought about it.

Narcissa. Regulus. _Love._

What is love if not obsession? If not carefully constructed madness?

* * *

He was never the sentimental sort, at least not as a child; he was the sort that tore the wings off butterflies not out of malice but out of curiosity. Who broke things to see how they fit together. The things Regulus cherished most always ended up in shreds.

Like a forgotten teddy bear or a quidditch banner.

Like a brother.

* * *

Sometimes it became too much for him; he'd imagine her pale neck thrust upwards, a shimmer of sweat across the small of her back, his hand tangled in her hair. A cruel smile on his lips as his fingers clamped down against her windpipe, as her face turned blue and the light left her eyes.

Love isn't pretty. It isn't delicate. It is brutal and quick and stabs like a letter-opener into an eye socket.

* * *

With bated breath he'd cry for her, and wake up to sheets around him tangled and soaked in sweat and semen as he drowned himself in his agony.

As daylight cast its first rays across his pillow, he would lie numbly, face turned involuntarily towards the window, the glass bending and distorting the morning light. He let the sun burn his eyes. He wished it was her, mercilessly beaming down at him with those colorless eyes. It was always the things he loved that hurt him. Unless he hurt them first.


	2. Shipwrecked

**Reviews are greatly appreciated, please.**

* * *

The agony of his obsession would be enough to make him shudder, to imagine himself as a drowned man, a bloated corpse among the waves of her infinite pleasure. He would float himself away on the tides, drink the foam of her love as the seagulls pecked his flesh away.

As a skeleton he would sink to the bottom of her ocean, to lie among the graveyard of the ships she had sunk with her love.

Sorrow. The bitterest of emotions; is it masochistic if one enjoys it?

He would ball the sheets into his hands and sob as he remembered her. And the tide rolled in, and the tide rolled out, and he floated away.

The drowned sailor on the crest of the wave, spying the first rays of morning, the hope, the most dangerous of Pandora's gifts, the plea he breathes like the humblest prayer from cracked lip for friendly shores.

He washed up upon white sands and took his first shallow breaths.

He was in love.

* * *

He sees her in flashes in a crowded hall, all long legs and flighty hands. He remembers lonely afternoons in the empty rooms of their ancestors- a decaying home, the ghosts of relatives who died young lingering in between the heavy brocaded curtains and in the layer of dust on the furniture; nights spent with a candle on the floor of the drawing room, wax dripping onto the wood floor, his hand resting gingerly on her thigh as she ran her skinny fingers over his palm.

A life line. A head line. A heart line.

"Oh," he hears her soft voice say, a sharp inhale of breathe. "What's this?"

She picks at the fourth line, tracing a nail through the deep cut of it, the sharp line that puts all the others to shame, broken and cracked but evident.

"Fate line," she mutters. "Lucky you."

He feels the derision in her voice. The candle flame casts shadows on her face like the eye sockets of a corpse.

* * *

She plucks at his heart like a child testing the strings of a violin- a note, short, sweet, incomplete. She knows nothing of how to make it _sing_.

He imagines gentleness now, asleep against her, sheltering her from the January wind as they curl together amongst the brambles on the forest floor. Rotting leaves and a canopy of frozen branches across a sky more white than blue.

Pure. Perfect. Like her.

The terror of that moment is all-encompassing, the moment he knows he can no longer turn back, he is hers, hers _alone_, and there can be no approximation of his feeling now- it is her or nothing, her arms, her soft skin. And he is spinning, and spinning, and falling, as if he has lost his grip on everything, as if the center of his universe has shifted into those marvelous gray eyes.

It sings. It sings. It sings for her alone.


	3. Mirror Image

Breath isn't needed. His heartbeat echoes in his ears like fate, a martial march into the distance, drumrolls, the hearts of lonely children lusting for angels. What is a boy to do? A boy in love is a terrible thing, a lost soul, drifting across the canvas of an imagined marriage bed.

The horror of it is this- it is doomed as soon as he believes in it. It cannot last. It cannot live. Their love is a miscarriage, a flood of black blood and wasted sparks of life. A mistake. A martyr.

He suffers, he stitches a ribbon above his heart, and each pinprick reminds him of her smile. And he holds his head straight, and he marches onward into the dawn of her love, to fight against impossible odds, Quixote to her Dulcinea, and each beat reminds him of the pain, and each pang reminds him…

The cellos rise. He is in love.

* * *

It is with thoughts of her that he rises, that he stumbles through stone hallways and dreamscapes hand in hand with. It is with thoughts of her that he unfolds his robes, that he dresses, that he fixes his reflection to the mirror with. He pins down his twin with shards of her, pushpins of Narcissa, dissects him with the scalpel of the girl he loves.

He borrows her shadow and stitches it to his feet, so that it may follow him about his day.

He has her ribbon. He has her shadow. He wants her.

* * *

From childhood, he was one thing and she another. He was the spiderwebs in the corners of an empty home, the shadows in an old man's dreams. He was the remnants of a dying city, the ashes of a fire. He was spent, gray, monochromatic. An etching upon the bark of a gnarled old tree- one sees it and wonders, "Was there a boy? Was there a lover?"

He is nothing but a carcass.

She was the smell of vanilla and lilac, the sound of footprints in a deserted hall. A little girl's giggle, a cloud of white powder. She was the way light hit a prism and fractured and only became more beautiful. She was a china doll, a decorative thing, too fine to touch or play with, dressed in ruffles and lace.

She was barefoot days and firefly nights. She was Venus in her shell upon the frothy waves, she was Spring in the forest among the nymphs, a Botticelli angel in fresco upon a cathedral wall.

He was Narcissus. And as he stared into the pool of water in despair and enchantment, he ever so slowly became her.

* * *

They were playmates in the halls of a dying dynasty, the last of a line. They consumed doom with their mothers' milk. It was the dust that swirled around the manor, the illuminated particles that floated here and there like flies.

Toujours pur. _Toujours les misérables_.

There was a horrible sense of inevitability for them, growing up. At his mother's skirts he learned the art of lies; he entangled his fingers with those of his brother, until the fingers were suddenly gone, and Sirius would listen no more.

She would lie awake in a narrow bed into the early morning hours and listen to the soft breathing of two sisters- and then to the breathing of one.

In knife nicks on each other's palms they found the blood they had lost.


	4. And Eden Falls

He carried the scar on his palm for the rest of his days (and even as he sank out of sight beneath the waves, pulled down by rotting corpses grasping at his thin limbs, he'd flail his hands helplessly above him and there- on the tracks of the fate line- sat the mark of Orion Black's pocket knife, made by flighty white little girl hands, the cut that had pressed into hers and let their blood mingle and showed that she was his and he was hers, eternally.)

She carried the scar on her palm for the rest of her days, but after a decade, after a lifetime, she couldn't quite recall what had placed it there.

* * *

They lived in shades of gray in the halls of Grimmauld Place, and perhaps it was fate that in the end, they would seek out each other as a refuge from the tempest of their worlds.

The orchestra swells and sparkles like a movie score- see the lost children fall into each other's arms, the sad little boy and girl with mirror image faces and butterfly wing eyes.

He moved and she moved.

He moved in her.

They found each other amongst winter storms and brambled branches, and he took her among the thorns of roses overgrown as the house stood like a silent witness to their innocence and their sins.

He felt her kitten wheezes against his throat, felt her fingernails rake his naked back, felt the soft "oh" of her lips parting as they pressed against his collarbone. And he made his body into hers.

* * *

The church bells echoed across cobblestoned streets as they sat in their hideaway from the world, and even the floorboards fell silent as she lay in his arms against the musty sheets, the brocaded pillows.

Blonde hair falling across the sheets, tangled in his fingers, her blue eyes unfocused, she speaks:

"Is this our life?"

And he can't answer because the mere suggestion of the question floors him.

Life? Is this life? Can he expect forty, fifty, sixty more years of this? Of desperate, lonely collisions, of her and of him. He knows the nightmares she sleeps with, he knows the way she talks in her sleep, of the buzzing of wasps inside her skull. Each of them is broken. Is that anyway to start a life?

"Well?"

Her voice is insistent, and she stirs beside him, suddenly anxious, and her next words come out as a sort of whine, not annoying, but merely pathetic.

"Is this all we have to look forward to?"

To silence her, he pressed his chaffed lips to hers.

* * *

They fractured and faltered and fell like Lucifer, into tangled arms and wet sheets, until the flames licked their legs and made their eyes melt away.

Blindly they pawed, and rolled, their Eden a sweat-scented bedroom in a dying estate as childish pennants kept silent sentinel in green and silver on the walls.

The swell, the bated breath. The climax. The sin.

He spilled into her and she moaned and he moaned and the room spun and moaned and whispered, "Repent, repent, repent…"

Fingers entwined, icy blue eyes met icy blue.

"Regulus, do you love me?"

"I can't love anything."

* * *

Their gaze would meet in hallways and mirrored glass, and just as quickly fall away.

The knowledge of sin had crept into Eden; she blushed and gathered leaves and stitched them together just as he had once stitched to himself pieces of her.

Silence.


	5. Choices

A rented room. A cheap saloon.

And death to look forward to.

A barman's rag. An empty bag.

And nothing to go home to.

* * *

"Narcissa."

His voice echoes off dirty floors as he drinks himself to oblivion, the poetry of the lines of her face a far more poignant truth than his own lines of verse, scrawled in blood and the naivety of youth.

He awakes from her face to her face and as he sinks into the stinking sheets he sees nothing but that damned face.

And he remembers.

What is a boy in love to do?

A boy in love is to forget. A boy in love is to become a man in homeostasis.

Regulus wants to forget.

He cannot go back to Grimmauld Place; he cannot haunt the halls she so effectively rubbed her scent upon like a cat against trouser legs. And so he sits and drinks and forgets. It is the course of all men's lives. He can dust himself off. He can bury the memories and the lusts and Eden. He can lock the door to the garden. He can walk away.

He can sit and wait for death.

* * *

The torture of sanity and of aimlessness. A month he's been here, head on the oaken bar, eyes wide and sightless. Merely a month, merely thirty one days, merely seven hundred and forty-four hours, and a lifetime of thoughts of her.

He is finished now, a dark resolve in his Black heart.

He knows his path. He scatters her to the wind.

* * *

Black robes and green sparks. Pale faces and smoke screens. What surprises him is the efficiency of the task; the stilling of a heart, the ceasing of a scream in midthroat. The body crumples, a horrible silence in the swiftness of it, a certain inhumanity. He had always thought of death as personal, vengeful, merciful. It is not.

It is just a green flash of light… and nothing.

He closes the eyes of mothers and smothers their infants. A lanky angel of death in oversize robes, a beatific smile upon his emaciated face.

He eats their sins away.

_Don't think about all those things you fear; just be glad to be here._


End file.
